


Doubling

by whichstiel



Series: Season 13 Codas [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e04 The Big Empty, Longing, M/M, Origin Stories, Post-Episode: s13e04 The Big Empty, Resurrection, Reunions, Season/Series 13, The Big Bang, The Empty, episode coda, origin of the universe, spn 13x04, the big empty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 09:07:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12627660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: An origin tale of the universe and The Empty, followed by a sweet Dean/Cas reunion.





	Doubling

**** There once was a deep without a beast. Without an anything. There was no dark because there was no light. There simply was.

Nothing.

When light emerged it slid in slyly, balled low unto itself, a proton and then another proton. It scuttled across the deep like a creeping mouse. It rolled and it shook and it banged into itself. It doubled in size, regular as a heart beat.  _ Double. Double.  _

It grew in the heart of the deep - a perfect ball of matter -  _ something _ in a sea of nothing. The deep empty sea groaned at the intrusion of the rapidly doubling universes blooming at its center. Where the something touched, the nothing...became. Soon the pulsing, doubling universes burned at the center of the deep like acid. Every heartbeat of growth carved away at the nothing until it feared. It... _ feared _ .

The sentient fear grew around the growing worlds. Like an oyster surrounds sand the nothingness pressed thickly around the grain of universes at its center. Where it touched the glowing matter it became aware of itself and howled in misery to know its own nature. Nothingness coalesced around the world-bubble. It became a scab in the deep, holding the cancerous growth at bay. The scarred tissue touched both the worlds and the nothing, and became The Empty. 

The Empty slept to forget itself.

Thus shielded from nothingness, the universe-matter begat gods who in turn begat creatures of stunning variety. One day, as The Empty slumbered, a trickster god - often consumed with inventing and destroying throughout the multivariate stars - pushed his way past the pearl-black boundary. He crept through, quiet as a mouse, and observed The Empty with awe. Here was a place vaster than the universes where he could store his failures and disappointments. The Empty would keep them shadowed from the light growing like a garden at its center. God could ignore them, there.

When the first of his immortal creations troubled him God cursed himself for ever thinking to make anything eternal at all. He caused to be made blades overlaid with a curse, a spell of eternal sleep. One by one the immortals who bucked his machine fell to these blades, slipped into deep slumbers, and were sent through the cracks in the universes to The Empty. 

The Empty slept and unbeknownst to itself, became empty no longer.

The universes grew. Time passed and the nothing waited patiently for the light to draw back in on itself and collapse, barely more than a fragile soap bubble of creation. It was a waiting game and Nothing, thanks to the cancerous light, was patient.

* * *

Castiel, aeons later, found himself in a waiting game as well.

“Release me,” Castiel choked out, less from lack of air and more from the powerful hand slowly compressing his vocal chords as it dangled him in the darkness. The entity was old, almost fathomless, and smelled like a howl of absolute suffering. He knew if he stayed here with it, his descent into madness would be horrifyingly fast. Castiel doubled down on his threats.  “I’ll tell you every story I know, and I know them all. I’ll sing--” He broke off, swallowing uselessly against the hand. The creature from the empty snarled at him, lips working in voiceless fury. Finally, after minutes, or hours their fingers loosened enough for Castiel to continue, “--every show tune I know. The worst ones too. And if you hurl me away from you I’ll wake up every demon or angel I come across, even if I have to walk for a millennia between each one.”

“You wouldn’t stand a chance,” the creature wearing his face said, but their eyes looked worried and their gaze slipped away to some invisible point over Castiel’s shoulder. Perhaps they were envisioning scores of angels and demons marching across the yawning black. They threw Castiel down again and he curled in on himself, steeling himself for the next blow. 

When it came, a sharp kick to the ribs, he tried to flow with it. He wondered, dully, how much damage he could sustain here. Time was meaningless. There was no way to measure it - no passage of planets around a sun or celestial timeclock marking time across the celestial plane. While he felt a rushing urge to return to Sam and Dean before they grew old and died, he truly had no idea if that had come to pass already. In his brief walk through the aching black, calling for anybody, Castiel had felt madness tickle at the corner of his perception. He’d thought of Dean, then, and his description of his solitary prison cell in those missing months. How the solitude drove him mad. Without anything but himself Castiel knew he’d quickly become an echo chamber. The thought of it was horrifying and even worse, felt inevitable. After all, he’d already sipped at madness in the past. If anything, that experience had taught him that madness was simply a point along a continuum of human experience and the trip towards it was as fast and smooth as a toboggan on an icy hill. If he found any other sleepers, would he be in any fit state to wake them?

The creature buried their fingertips into his hair and pushed at his scalp in a fierce caress. “Give up? Pal?” they spat. 

Castiel tried to tamp down on the moan that threatened to escape him. “Never,” he grunted. As the entity tugged cruelly at the short hairs at the base of his neck he contemplated transformation. He had woken here in the shape of his body back on Earth. It had been a comfort when he’d first woken up. Now he wondered if it was a weakness to maintain a human form when it could be used to inflict so much pain. He ground his teeth together. Pain was grounding, however. Tangible. He curled his hands into fists and drove his nails into his palms to drive away the fear that threatened to overtake him every time the entity pressed near. “I’ll never give up.”

The entity sat back on their haunches and cocked their head with an exaggerated frown. It  _ tssked _ loudly. “You know, I just don’t get why. Why would you go back to that mess of a world?” They pushed a finger through Castiel’s lips and ran it along his teeth, gathering the memory of saliva. They rubbed two fingers together with distaste. “It’s so sticky.”

“Let me go,” Castiel repeated, ignoring the question. “And you can go back to sleep and forget any of this. You’ll lose nothing by letting me go.”

The entity rolled their eyes cartoonishly towards the expanding darkness above them. “Oh, little baby angel,” they cooed. “Even the smallest plankton feeds the whale.”

Castiel narrowed his eyes at the thing. “We’re fuel for you,” he guessed. “All of us. The angels and demons who enter here. We give you energy just as souls provide it to Heaven. And to Hell and Purgatory. You need us now.”

The entity looked sick at the word  _ need _ , but it did not contradict Castiel.

Castiel saw his advantage and he achingly pushed himself upright. “You’ve been in my mind. You’ve seen--” he tried and failed to suppress a seasick shudder at the memory of the absolute invasion. “You’ve seen what I am.”

“And what are you?” they said in return, eyes giving away nothing now.

“A spanner in the works,” Castiel said. “The great disrupter. Believe me, you don’t want me here.” The words clunked hollowly in his chest and he worried, for a moment, that the entity could read his thoughts even now. Castiel repeated the words of abuse he’d endured but they no longer felt...bad. “Whatever plan you have, I’ll change it. I’ll find a way. You can’t destroy me and you can’t avoid me. I’ll be the nightmare under your skin, digging around for your weakness.”

The entity flinched back and for a moment their face seemed half eaten by shadow, as though they were about to melt back into the inky matter. When it swooped forward, both hands extended, Castiel steeled himself for more blows.

They never came. Instead, Castiel found himself held by the lapels of his coat. He was vaguely aware of them spinning around now, his legs flying out behind him from centripetal force. The entity, his one fixed point of reference in the darkness, grinned. “Fine,” they lilted in their strangely brusque voice, “have it your way.” They let go.

Castiel flew almost too fast to fathom. The smirking face of his tormenter disappeared rapidly until Castiel was swallowed in darkness again. Despair grew through him like wild rose brambles, sharp and fast. When the entity disappeared from view entirely, Castiel couldn’t even maintain the sense of motion. He wondered how long he would fly like this, fast as his wings but with no point of reference. Would he catch something or just keep going?

When he hit the wall, his legs buckled behind him first and if he’d had a vessel instead of just a corporealized spirit they would have shattered at the impact. Castiel felt himself fold down and his lips parted in agony. He gathered himself to scream loudly enough that it would reverberate back to the entity. He wouldn’t let him go so easily. Castiel compressed, folding in like crumpled paper. He looked down as his chin neared the wall. He was in a bubble, body collapsing into his lightwave form as it pressed into the black boil on the invisible wall.  _ I am made of light _ , he thought weakly as his essence was subsumed into the wall and his body transformed into blue grace and intent. 

The bubble closed over what once was his head. Blue light burned against the walls that held him now. Rage filled him. He’d burn through it if it took a million years. 

Suddenly the bubble burst on the other end, like a soap bubble pop, and Castiel’s essence screamed back into reality. 

There was no time to feel joy or relief. The entity had hurled him at Earth like a meteor. He was moving so fast that the Veil separating the spiritual plane from the mortal one was upon him in an instant. He tried to open his wings and catch himself before he plunged through the Veil but The Empty had weakened him considerably. His unfurled wings just made him feel more vulnerable and so he curled into a ball again, a comet plunging towards the ground. Now free of the emptiness, thoughts came at him quickly now.

He was going too fast to avoid the veil and once through it, he’d need a vessel to survive for very long. The thought of a new vessel with a soul rammed into it filled him with distaste. He wanted his own body and here, outside the mortal plane, was the only time he’d have the power to make it happen. 

Time shuddered around him as Castiel mined energy from the speed he’d developed hurtling towards Earth. He channeled that towards the planet.

Far below next to a small cabin on the water, a field of cerulean hyacinths shivered violently, although there was no breeze at the time. They shuddered again and this time petals jumped from the blooms like a sudden blue cloud. The earth rose from beneath them. Black dust spun up in the air, whirling the flowers, soil, and ash into a localized tornado. The tornado spun and howled as the molecular traces of Castiel’s former body whirled from the ground. The tree on the water’s edge shuddered and liquid rose as vapor into the air and joined the whirlwind. Behind it all, the wave-wracked water spread before the distant mountains. A shape formed in the center of the tornado.

Repairing human bodies was something Castiel specialized in after aeons spent on earth. He set to it now quickly, rebuilding the body he’d known intimately for the past several years. The fire that had transmuted him into ash had burned hot but the atomic level remembered his grace enough to aid Castiel in his building. He rebuilt his body with ash and earth and the juice of the flowers which had eaten of his flesh. 

The veil was almost upon him.

Castiel built clothing with the second’s breath of time he had, pouring energy from his descent into it. And then the tornado lifted the body and spun it high up into the air. The body crossed over one mountain range, then two as Castiel dragged it to meet him where he would fall. He plunged through the Veil, wings wrapped tight against the burn of it, and met his vessel in the air ten feet above the ground.

The world, which had been blue fire and stars, went black again.

When Castiel woke it was first with panic. What if it had all been a dream, the roots of madness already setting in? But instead of darkness he saw red, the color of light streaming through flesh and blood. He opened his eyes. Climbed to his feet. Ran his hands over his body and smiled at his work.  _ I did it _ , he thought, giddy with relief.  _ I’m back. _

After the emptiness Earth should have been overwhelming to his angelic senses. He could smell dried grass, warm earth, the tang of animals, ripening blackberries. The sun warmed his skin and he turned his face towards it, enveloped in ecstasy. All his years in Heaven and all his years on Earth had failed him to prepare for this absolute euphoria. He tasted the air on his tongue, warm and heady. “I did it,” he said, and laughed at the sound of his own voice. It sounded so small - so perfect - here in the world.

Time, still an elastic thing after his time in The Empty, stretched on as he inhaled the sun-warmed air, redolent with the smell of dying grasses. He was reminded of his time in the gardens of the mental hospital. He remembered the way he had felt tracing his fingers through the leaves of the roses, following the mathematical path of a bee as it scuttled from flower to flower.  _ Ecstasy.  _ Castiel let himself feel it again for the first time in years. “My god,” he said, and it came out more like a prayer than blasphemy. “What a beautiful world.”

The fall through the Veil and the effort he’d sustained rebuilding his body had weakened him and his stomach growled grumpily. Castiel strode towards the blackberry brambles, knelt at the ends of the trailing vines like they were an altar, and ate. When he was done, blackberry juice stained his fingertips purple and sweetness lingered on his lips. He ran his tongue over his lower lip and pushed himself up to stand again.

Tentatively, he tried his wings. Though they felt stronger than they had in years, he still couldn’t fly. Apparently the consequences of Metatron’s spell surpassed death and rebirth. Still, strength rapidly returned to him and he set out across the tangled field with good will. 

Night fell by the time he found a town. The lights in the houses were already dimmed but this trace of humanity was so beautiful that Castiel staggered for a moment and had to lean against a tree to recover. Oh, how he had missed this.  _ How long has it been?  _ he wondered as he walked through the quiet main street. During his walk he’d tried several times to try to find Sam and Dean in the swirl of prayers choking the air. If they were praying, it wasn’t to him. 

He found the phone booth on the side of a dusty old hardware store. It seemed covered in wind-scraped earth, standing here only because it was forgotten. He clenched his hand and then reached out and picked up the receiver. The sound swelled in the air like a benediction before he even pressed the receiver to his ear. There was a dial tone.

Castiel sagged against the phone booth and closed his eyes, almost lightheaded with relief. The sharp edge of the metal box dug into his forehead and the evening around him rang with the whir of insects singing their last songs before winter descended.  _ I know who you love, _ the entity had said.  _ There’s nothing for you there. _ Castiel knew that they had been pulling his own thoughts and feelings from his mind and throwing them back like a bullet. It had still hurt. Fear prickled at the edges of his hope and relief.

He reached out a hand that barely trembled at all, and dialed. The phone rang twice before Dean picked up. “Yeah?” he said. He sounded weary and Castiel wondered if they had just returned from a hunt, or were on one now. He should have waited until morning. He was disturbing them. He was-- 

Castiel shook his head.  _ No. _ He deserved this. He deserved family and love, however he could get it. “Dean,” he said, filled with the honey-gold glow of relief and burgeoning joy. Dean was alive on the other end of the wire.

The line crackled. “Who is this?” Dean said sharply and Castiel smiled at his familiar suspicion. 

“Dean, it’s me.” The line remained quiet and Castiel helpfully added, “It’s me. Cas. I-- I’m back.”

Across the line there was the sound of heavy breathing and something slamming like a body against a wall. “What? You--” The tone of his voice was accusatory, angry. But feeling rose suddenly like a prayer around Castiel. It surrounded Castiel like a perfumed pool and his mouth fell open at the familiar colors that swirled almost tangibly before him. 

Dean’s longing, stronger than any verbal prayer, wrapped around Castiel and his voice broke as he said again, “I’m back, Dean. But my wings still don’t work so I-- I need a ride.”

Dean’s breath scraped harshly through the phone line and his question, when it came, sounded almost childlike. “It’s you?” he asked. “Cas?”

“I’m in Centerville, Iowa. There’s a park in the center of town across from the bank. I’ll be there waiting.”

* * *

Castiel waited under the sky-spanning canopy of an oak as the sun blushed pink against the sky and the world woke up around him. The street echoed with the growl of the Impala just before the sun reached its zenith and he stood, hands balled at his sides and feeling suddenly nervous. It had been months since his death and humans changed with alarming speed. Who would emerge from the Impala? 

Dean parked and turned off the car, then sat for a moment with his mouth open. Castiel took a tentative step forward, captivated by the sight of him. All his doubts at his reception fled his mind, not because they weren’t there but because they suddenly didn’t matter. Dean was alive in the world, and so was he. For right now, that was enough. He felt himself break into a grin and then Dean was out of the car and running across the grass. 

Dean crashed into Castiel and wrapped his arms around him tightly, folding him into his sweet, sunny warmth. He exhaled sharply against his shoulder. They didn’t speak but they didn’t need to. Space melted into a construct between them. 

Finally, Dean pulled back. “Cas,” he said, hands shifting to grip his shoulders and hold them apart. He looked at him from nose to toes. “It’s you.”

Castiel couldn’t control his smile and now, he didn’t want to. He grinned back at Dean and ran a half self-conscious hand down his hyacinth-blue tie. “It’s me.” Now that their embrace had broken he could get a good look at Dean. He looked gaunt, with deep gray circles shadowing his eyes. Suffering had etched cracks across his soul that seemed to knit with bright green-gold light the longer he stood in front of Castiel.

Castiel lifted his hand and laid it along Dean’s face, fitting his thumb across his cheekbone. “Are you alright? Is Sam okay?”

Dean’s laugh popped like a bubble into half a sob and he shook his head and looked away. Tears formed a new thin line along his eyes and he gulped with effort before he met Castiel’s gaze again. “I-- I am now,” he said slowly, deliberately. He exhaled shakily and then smiled the first true smile Castiel had seen from him in a long, long time. “Let’s go home, okay?” Dean pulled away but not entirely. Instead he slid one arm up and along Castiel’s back to press against his opposite shoulder. They walked back arm in arm to the car where Sam waited eagerly. 

Castiel tipped his chin to his side, considering Dean. “I’m already home,” he said quietly, so that the words only passed between the two of them. 

A flush rose like sunrise across Dean’s skin and his fingers tightened along Castiel’s sleeve. “Yeah,” he said roughly and they walked back to Sam together, like one creature who, doubled, finally became whole. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


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